Electric Objects Salon

Presented by Feel Train

Hi!

It's 2015 and our aesthetic tastes reflect the fact that we live, at least in part, on the internet. But is it possible to experience net art away from a laptop or phone, in some context other than multitasking our way against the day?

The Electric Objects Salon represents a hypothesis, that one vector for bringing net art itself into the home environment is the EO1, the world's first computer designed expressly for displaying net art.

Works

Continuing his streak of playing with human anxieties around technology, Kazemi's piece delivers and shakes apart live streaming news stories while presenting them in the frame of yellow journalism (the 19th century's version of clickbait). That, or it's another mediocre attempt at a Google Reader replacement...

Darius Kazemi is an internet artist under the moniker Tiny Subversions. His best known works are the Random Shopper (a program that bought him random stuff from Amazon each month) and Content, Forever (a tool to generate rambling thinkpieces of arbitrary length).

As Net Artist in Residence at the New York Public Library, Odell spent over 90 hours collecting decorative and non-informational elements from the NYPL Digital Map Collection. Juxtaposing them allows us to identify what is left off the maps, why the maps themselves were needed: not the oceans, but the people crossing them and why; not the land, but the people who lived there and what was done to them.

I am a Bay Area native/captive with an MFA in Design from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley. In my work, I mine imagery from online environments, most typically Google Maps, in an attempt to create candid portraits or to insist on the material nature of our modern networked existence.

What could be more natural than procedurally-generated and -named moths, pinned and mounted on a digital canvas? These creatures have never used their wings on wind, but Pipkin and Schmidt's Twitter bot offers a window into an alternate nature, imagined by our friend, the algorithm.

The world's history is built on the backs of black women, and Dupré captures both the power emanating from and oppressed upon her subject. Ms. Baker resists being reduced to a comfortably-viewed object, maintaining her own gaze and depths while the lens itself has fragmented from the pressure.

Lola Dupré is a collage artist and illustrator currently based in Galway, Ireland.
Working exclusively with paper and scissors her work references both the Dada aesthetic of the early 20th Century and the digital manipulations of the present day.
Since 2000 Lola has lived and worked in Scotland, Switzerland, France, Portugal, Spain and now Ireland. Lola is currently working on upcoming exhibition and editorial projects.

With its gentle rocking motion and soft pastel colors, Katz's vision of the future is one of technological soothing and calm. Computers as senders and collectors of water, a fraught scenario for today's laptops, mimics both the communication loop of speaker and listener as well as the ecosystem of earth and sky.

Part of his Ornament and Crime series, Myers' loop is at once easily grasped and aggressively challenging. Stripping concepts down to their most unadorned states (eg: a head and shoulders "walking" could represent a full body or a thought pattern (or...?)) allows the viewer to seek deeper and more personal meaning within the recurring action, creating a meditation on cause, effect, and blame.

After providing their postal codes, Wagenknacht located live weather feeds to find the color of the sky in each Kickstarter $5 Commission backer's location. Two backers' skies are then randomly matched, their colors merged into an elegant gradient that fades into a new backer pair every few minutes.

Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria, whose work explores the tension between expression and technology. She seeks to blend conceptual work with traditional forms of hacking and sculpture.

Working with images of each backer of Kickstarter's $5 Commission, Reas offers a collective "self-portrait" of the community that funded the project. Each face that cycles through suggests a different aspirational composite of the "average" person interested in net art. ;P

Casey Reas writes software to explore conditional systems as art. Through defining emergent networks and layered instructions, he has defined a unique area of visual experience that builds upon concrete art, conceptual art, experimental animation, and drawing.

For George's piece in Kickstarter's $5 Commission, each backer provided their birthday and something they've always wanted but could never have. The work changes daily to reflect the unfulfilled wish of a different backer on their actual birthday.

James George addresses the emotional response to science fiction technologies as they become reality. Developer of the DepthKit, a volumetric cinema system, James has created a new medium for cinematic expression to equip the next generation of filmmakers with a new vernacular.

For her interpretation of Kickstarter's $5 Commission, McCarthy performs the first stage of friendship as a brute force event. Spending 5 minutes apiece with each of the 1,108 project backers on the social media platform of their choice, the performance forces the viewer into a simultaneous awareness of the intersecting roles of subject, object, entertainment product, and laborer that modern interpersonal relationships demand.